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"Jewish archives."
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Creating Archival Access
The rebirth of Eastern European Jewish studies in the postcommunist era, especially from the discipline of history, often leans on a narrative of archival access. Prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union, local archives were closed to western researchers; the fall of the Soviet Union unlocked the archives and overnight the field was resuscitated from its Soviet and Holocaust extinction. It was a narrative that fueled Schainker's own passion for the subject and excitement over archival discovery. Some of his greatest joy in mining state records on Jews in Russia and Ukraine came with document delivery, when he signed his name on the paper slip attached to each file--like the library check-out cards of old rendered obsolete by computing. He felt he'd hit the jackpot if he was the first name entered on the archival slip, and often he was only second or third. This western narrative, however, obscures the grassroots efforts made by Soviet Jewish activists of the 1980s who had already then begun to revitalize scholarship on Eastern European Jewry, mining Soviet archives for unpublished sources on the Jewish experience.
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Rescue or Theft? Zosa Szajkowski and the Salvaging of French Jewish History after World War II
From 1940 to 1961, the Jewish historian Zosa Szajkowski (1911–78) illicitly moved tens of thousands of documents from France to the United States. There, he used them as the basis for scores of scholarly articles, eventually selling them to American research libraries. Should Szajkowski be remembered as a rescuer or a thief? This article argues that neither of these terms fully fits what he did. Rather, Szajkowski was a morally ambiguous figure who began to remove Judaica from Europe when Jewish life there was most threatened but continued even after the situation returned to normal. A rescuer who certainly became a thief, Szajkowski's story makes greater sense when placed in the context of the shifting balance of power within the Jewish world that took place following the Holocaust.
Journal Article
Narrating the Archive? Family Collections, the Archive, and the Historian
This article seeks to open a discursive space in which to reflect on issues of Holocaust historiography arising from emerging research on personal archives collected by “ordinary” people in relation to the Holocaust. The explorations, intended as a discussion piece, are anchored in a specific context, namely that of the Dorrith Sim Collection (DMSC) which is held in the Scottish Jewish Archives Centre (SJAC) in Glasgow. This collection offers a focus to concretize the historiographical discussion in a largely un-researched collection, while enabling consideration of a range of related collections and publications. The article investigates the historiographical practices of those involved in the collection, preservation, presentation, and publication processes, and considers the inherent ethical choices, choices that highlight the agency of the family, the archivist, and the scholar. Ethical choices, here, the investment of specific meanings and claims to significance, are amplified in this context because of their connection to genocide. I suggest that a “transparent historiography” that accounts for the research process within the published narrative could address the challenges arising from the necessity to be selective about what to collect, preserve, and write about, and how to do so. I borrow from other fields of research and professional practice to highlight possible avenues along which to advance historiographical discussion.
Journal Article
Jewish archives and archival documents: Israel and the Diaspora
Throughout 2000 years of exile, Jews amassed documentation reflecting their creativity and organization wherever they lived. Communal archives dating since the Middle Ages have survived. In addition, documentation about Jews is found in archives of rulers, governments, and cities. Conditions changed in the twentieth century due to new developments: the rise of the Jewish national movement, leading to the establishment of the State of Israel, and the destruction of thousands of communities and their cultural possessions in the Holocaust perpetrated against European Jewry by the Nazis. The centrality of Eretz Israel and Israel in Zionist ideology led to the concept that it should be the locale for Jewish archives. Thus, for example, in 1933 the archives of the World Zionist Movement were transferred from Berlin to Jerusalem. The situation became more acute after WWII: If entire or partial archives of destroyed communities survived, to whom do they belong—the states in which they were created or the Jewish people? This dilemma also faces existing communities without archival consciousness. Should everything be concentrated in Israel? In recent years, there has been a change in the paradigm of Israel–Diaspora relations. In a global transnational world, with constantly developing technical means, archives can remain in the communities that created them, provided they are maintained and made available to the public in accordance with accepted archival practice.
Journal Article
The Importance of Being Discovered: The Werner Von Boltenstern Shanghai Photograph and Negative Collection
The Werner von Boltenstern Shanghai Photograph and Negative Collection, housed in Loyola Marymount University’s William H. Hannon Library, is a series of photographs of 1930s–1940s Shanghai taken by Werner von Boltenstern. The images capture a time and place at a crossroads of culture and history. World War II and the Second Sino-Japanese War were raging and the city, a trade center populated by numerous peoples, including Chinese citizens, British, French, and American nationals, Sephardic and Russian Jews, and the occupying Japanese military, was receiving an influx of European Jews fleeing Nazi Europe. The rediscovery of this collection (it sat unused for many years) led to its digitization, a successful crowdsourcing effort to gather more metadata, and the incorporation of the collection into an LMU Literature of the Holocaust class digital project. Through these endeavors, the library has increased its understanding of the collection’s historical value, in particular as it relates to Holocaust studies and Jewish studies more broadly.
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The UCLA Sephardic Archive Initiative: Finding the Keys to an Untold History
This essay introduces the scope and aim of the Sephardic Archive Initiative at the University of California, Los Angeles. In conjunction with the Library, Special Collections, and the Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies, this project seeks to locate, collect, archive, and share documents and ephemera relating to Sephardic history. With a focus on their journeys to Los Angeles and Southern California, the initiative aims to tell the stories of Jews from North Africa, the Middle East, the Mediterranean, the Balkans, and the lands of the former Ottoman Empire. The transnational ties of Sephardic commercial, intellectual, religious, social, and family networks have produced a richly tangled web of history, which for the past century has found a thriving base in Los Angeles. The project seeks to create a hub of scholarly and communal investment, interest, and exploration of materials related to the Sephardic past.
Journal Article
By Post or by Ghost
Robert Eisler, a tragically hilarious pedant, raconteur, dubious polymath, armchair anthropologist, destitute aristocrat, concentration camp prisoner, war hero, gadfly, and buffoon who serves as a background figure in the stories of such celebrated scholars as Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin, Aby Warburg, and Moses Gaster. His name is likely to be familiar to readers of JQR (particularly the centenarian ones) because of the war of words he waged with Solomon Zeitlin in its pages between 1927 and 1931 over the so-called Slavonic Jesus manuscript tradition. Here, Collins will examine a few of Eisler's public and private letters to trace the development of his controversial reconstruction of the writings of Josephus--based on the Slavonic (or technically \"Old Russian\") tradition--and his theory about what that reconstructed tradition might tell us about the historical Jesus. The picture that emerges from these letters is surprisingly vivid and human.
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The Schachter-Shalomi Collection Anchors Post-Holocaust American Judaism Archive at University of Colorado
Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, founder of Jewish Renewal, was a visionary teacher and leader who developed tools for transformation and helped a generation of Jewish Americans rekindle their faith. This article describes the acquisition, assessment, digitization and public access dimensions of the Schachter-Shalomi Collection housed at the University of Colorado, Boulder archives.
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Between the Diaspora and Zion: Cecil Roth and His American Friends
Near the start of his career (1925-1930) Cecil Roth developed a vision of the significance of the Diaspora to Jewish life, which he articulated during his tenure at the Intercollegiate Menorah Society Summer School of 1930. For Roth, Jewish creativity could be expressed only by possessing a firm grasp of Jewish history and its essentials. In his summer school lectures Roth sought to integrate Jewish history into the broader sweep of European history, while at the same time he introduced students to historical sources beyond traditional Jewish texts. In the aftermath of World War II Roth entered into a prolonged correspondence with the American Jewish historian Jacob Rader Marcus, who had recently founded the American Jewish Archives, whose purpose was to forward the study of Jewish history by collecting the documents that would enable future research. In their correspondence, Roth and Marcus enunciated an approach to Jewish history that would influence the field for a generation.
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